USING BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT TEAMS TO INCREASE

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

A CUSTOMER MANUFACTURING GROUP CASE STUDY
The Background:
As a core value the company had a belief in
providing customer service at a level that exceeded
industry norms.
Two factors had converged that required
attention for the company to continue to
Without appropriately provide service at this level. First, as other
changing a culture to companies in the industry got better, the
coincide with, actively company needed to raise its level of customer
support, and be a service to continue to exceed industry norms.
foundational part of Secondly, the company's growth over the last
the new "should-be" decade had reached a point where customers’
process, the integrated needs exceeded the capabilities of the processes
process will never they had in place. This manifested itself in terms
achieve its goals and, of people who were working in ways that were
it may in fact collapse
not effective or efficient, and were providing less
customer service than their values and
during the
competitive realities required.
development effort.
The company believed that failure to resolve
Change is very seldom
these issues would limit their success going
forward.
free and easy, and
changing an
The Company:
organization's culture
The company is a leading financial services
never is. It starts at
business, which had been operating for over 15
the top.
years with consistent profitable growth.
Their Issue:
Aside from not providing a superior customer
experience, the company found too many of its
work processes were person-dependent. That is,
without a specific person available, processes
came to a halt.
While internal and infrastructure aspects of
running the operations were very much
process-based, they were not process-driven or
managed. Specifically, there were absolutely:
• No performance metrics or measurements
of any of the process steps or for any of the
many people responsible for effecting their
execution.
• No standard process maps or information
flows upon which to build a management-
metrics database.
• No standard or at least modeled process
times for an entire quote/buy/fulfillment
cycle, for any one point in the cycle to
another, or within any single process
activity.
Things just happened, and pressure was
brought to bear on the staff to correct problems
that arose but not to identify and eliminate the
root causes.
All of these made for a very inefficient
internal operation and consumed excessive
amounts of time creating or reinventing an ad-
hoc process for each type of client project as
they occurred. And the squeakiest wheel always
got the grease, which often became a matter of
who had the most grease.
Additionally, as the company grew — in
terms of number of clients, types of projects,
and activity volumes — increasing demands
were being placed on the company's
infrastructure to perform up to their previous
lower volume, high quality standards.
As a consequence of all this, process and
processing mistakes were increasing which had
a deleterious impact on clients, and on
interaction with the various pertinent
government agencies and departments. Long-
time clients began to be concerned about the

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CASE STUDY
company's increasingly visible goofs, while new clients began to
second-guess their decisions to work with the company.
An ever-increasing amount of time was spent putting out fires,
tracing down errors, and apologizing to all concerned parties. Even
rudimentary customer communications regarding project status — a
previously highly recognized competitive strength — had begun to slip.
The key producers were increasingly busy trying to produce
while the beleaguered staff was just that.
And then, the market began to drop, first just a bit here and
there in various segments and then precipitously across the
industry. Previously struggling to adjust to record growth — with
process systems that couldn't keep up — the company now had to
be concerned about how to manage their operations in a much
more efficient and effective manner, by necessity.
Customer Manufacturing Group's Role:
We were brought in to coach several process improvement teams.
The goal was to improve several customer-facing processes while
teaching the teams how to conduct their own process
improvement projects in the future.
One of the goals associated with each process was to ensure
that the company's clients and its own operations staff knew at all
times the status of all activities associated with new and on-going
projects. And from the internal operations perspective, all
personnel would know precisely their own roles and
responsibilities and each others'.
Four critical processes were targeted for improvement. We
defined the deliverable for each of the four processes to consist of:
1. Fully documented process maps of the entire process flow,
from start to finish.
2. Process maps that would identify the individual activities and
include cognizant department responsibilities, action to take,
when to do it, links to upstream and downstream activities,
and would reference all supporting documentation, and
identify any customer contacts that were required.
3. Time-line charts for the entire process, standard process times
for each activity and wait or queue times between individual
steps (usually involving a wait for various documents from a
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company external source, e.g., the client, a project partner, a
government agency, etc.)
Our Process and What We Did:
1. With management's help, identified all appropriate members
for each process team. This included both supervisory and
staff-level personnel. These were people who were intimately
involved in all or at least part of the process activities; they
were the action takers. (The teams consisted of 5-8 people,
with some people on more than one team.)
2. Assigned team leaders for each process. A key point here was
that a team leader could not be the senior-most executive(s)
who oversaw that process.
3. Set committed-to team meeting schedules, and as process
development activity progressed, worked with the team to
establish individual roles and duties for certain aspects of
process definition and mapping.
4. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of each process mapping
activity, we ensured that all team members fully understood
the purpose and objective of each process and the purpose
and responsibilities of the team.
5. Laid-out the "process-process," that is, the overall process
development and mapping activity, including our role and the
team's role.
6. One key team issue was to decide on the appropriate
documentation technique for each process map. There is a
plethora of software process mapping tools available on the
market, from very simple to very complex. Given the
company's concerns with regard to time and money resources
that would be consumed by each process team, the teams
decided to use Visio as their map tool since it was already
available to them and a few of the team members were at least
somewhat familiar with it.
7. An underlying objective of our involvement was to — as subtle
as possible — lay the ground work for the formation of
authorized and empowered post-development process teams,
that is, the team that would then become responsible for the
implementation and full flow and activity of the process and
for its maintenance, after the process was approved.
8. Once all the above groundwork was in-place, we began the
actual process mapping activity. Our methodology for each
process team was to guide, advise, question and to initiate
thoughtful discussion.
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CASE STUDY
9. To begin the process development and mapping, our
methodology was to first develop the current "as-is" process,
and once mapped, to analyze and evaluate it, and to identify
deficiencies, redundancies / duplications of activities by
different departments, performance gaps and loop-holes,
problem areas for communications break-downs with clients
and project partners, and internal operations, other error-
prone activities, and inefficiencies in general.
10. After the as-is process was seemingly finished, we instituted a
brief review break in the schedule to enable each team
member to step back and confirm that the process as mapped
was indeed the way things actually happened. The technique
here was to follow the mapped process in their daily work to
find errors, identify critical missing steps and crucial
supporting documentation that had been left out, and so on.
This did result in some changes to the previously "finished"
process map.
11. Next came the activity of developing and mapping
the "should be" (or "must be") process. The first
step — before beginning any mapping work — was
to identify all the process and activity problem areas
associated with the real as-is process that needed to
be modified or eliminated, and any new activities
that needed to be added.
Two very key elements were carefully evaluated for
inclusion in the "should be" processes:
a. Identification of all customer value-added /
customer touch points. These needed to be made more
customer-friendly, efficient, and effective; some to be
modified and new ones to be added. This was an aspect of
the company's operation that had begun to slip noticeably,
and had to be given new life.
b. Eliminating all the time and energy-consuming waste in the
process, that is, process steps that added no value to the
customer or to internal operations. The biggest target here
was multiple redundancy paperwork and document
processing within and between departments. The company
had become a huge paper factory, largely "just because," as
in, because no one ever looked critically at this operating
characteristic before.
This was a crucial management-involved step because many
changes impacted the current organization (structure and
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management), company policies and practices, executives' roles,
and in some cases, an executive's personal beliefs, feelings, and
conduct. Any and all changes to the as-is process had to be agreed
on by all parties before the actual mapping of the should-be could
begin.
12. As each should-be process map was completed, it was
transformed into a formal company document in complete
detail inline with its objectives. An official company process
folder was established in the computer master database, and
rules were established regarding the authorities and
responsibilities for maintaining the integrity of the process as
documented and for effecting any subsequent changes to the
process.
13. The new process for each activity was communicated to
cognizant department personnel, and training or familiarization
sessions were scheduled for employees who would be tasked
with working with the process.
An integrated process improvement undertaking will
include the basis for making continuous process
improvements (which involves process and management
metrics), lean thinking, constraint analysis, and cross-
functional team development, to name a few of the stones
in the new foundation.
The Results:
Upon completion of our new process-ready assignment,
circumstances arose that made these improvements critical to the
company's on-going success. During the seven months of our
engagement with the company, the national economy as a whole
and the specific industry involved began to rapidly tank. Having
more effective and efficient processes in place helped the company
weather this storm.
Epilogue: Culture and Process Change; Not
Strange Fellows but Necessary Bed Fellows
All businesses (or any organization for that matter) have cultures. If
a business has heretofore not had a process-driven internal
approach as part of that culture, it might be best described as one
that operates on the basis of individuals' preferences, charisma,
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CASE STUDY
embedded best practices based on historical perspectives, closely
guarded turf and silo protection, and a host of other operational
attributes. Many of these are quite frankly cemented firmly in-place
in order to maintain the comfort zones that have been established
throughout the organization.
If if not overtly process driven, all organizations have
processes for most of the operational activities, some documented
— in one form or another — and some not, and usually without
regard (or much of it) to the upstream and downstream activities
that surround it. Everyone is responsible for doing a certain thing;
"things" rule the day.
All of this comprises an organization's "as-is" culture, and
changing this type of culture is usually a very daunting task.
Committed, Total Involvement:
Making a change from a sometimes loosely strung-together series
of individual things to a comprehensive, fully integrated process
flow can change everything. The two largest issues involved here
are: 1) The functional aspects of converting the processing of
individual things into a one-piece-flow in which the ankle bone is
indeed seen as connected to the head bone each effecting the
other as well as all bones in between, and; 2) Changing the culture
— for everyone concerned — at all levels of the organization. The
latter is often the most arduous undertaking of an integrated
process improvement project.
Without appropriately changing a culture to coincide with,
actively support, and be a foundational part of the new "should-be"
process, the integrated process will never achieve its goals and, it
may in fact collapse during the development effort. Change is very
seldom free and easy, and changing an organization's culture never
is. It starts at the top.
An integrated process improvement undertaking will include
the basis for making continuous process improvements (which
involves process and management metrics), lean thinking, constraint
analysis, and cross-functional team development, to name a few of
the stones in the new foundation. The most senior responsible
management must play active roles in encouraging, nurturing and
participating in the project work and in aiding all concerned to keep
their "eyes on the prize" — more effective and efficient operational
flows that also add value to all the customer-facing activities.
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Improving an organization's ROI also includes improvement
in the return on all internal assets employed. This is one of
executive management's primary responsibilities and often involves
significant changes in processes . . . even their own.
What Is Our Standard Management Process
Improvement Methodology?:
Aside from varying logistics and mechanics we employ in our man-
agement process improvement projects, we mold our activities
around the following core concepts.
Process Management (PM)
PM defines that all work is done via documented processes
with controls, feedback, and performance limits.
Constraint Analysis (CA)
CA defines how to allocate resources such that total system
throughput is optimized.
Continuous Improvement (CI)
CI defines the mentality and processes for discovering how to
improve the performance of each activity within the process . . .
and of the process itself.
Lean Thinking (LT)
LT describes the attitude of applying 'just enough' resources to
an activity to get the job done with no waste. Within the CMS
concept we apply LT to the entire process as a whole and
combine it with CA, in effect "balancing the line" from start to
finish with just the right amount of appropriate resources
applied at the right time.
Looking for the Foundation:
Using the above principles and our Customer Manufacturing®
System model, we begin our assessment of a client's operations by
looking for a foundation or master plan that incorporates these
process guidelines. Without them, many marketing/sales operations
metaphorically resemble the Winchester Mystery House in San
Jose, California; a 160-room structure with no logical, rational
design or layout, just separate rooms, some connected some not,
but each taking up space and costing a great deal of money.
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